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Donald Dawson-Durgan was desperate for money in the days before he shot and killed a man who treated him like a son, prosecutors said.

Dawson-Durgan had lost nearly $9,000 dollars in one day at what was then the Downtown Horseshoe Casino. In the month before the May 4, 2016 killing, prosecutors said, his gambling losses totaled about $46,000.

“I owe everybody,” he told detectives during the last of three interrogations.

“I had to get my hands on some money,” he said, according to prosecutors. “I wanted to get Mr. Singh to bail me out.”

But 64-year-old Anant Singh didn't give him money, as he'd done in the past, Hamilton County Assistant Prosecutor Rick Gibson said during closing arguments Friday in Dawson-Durgan’s murder trial. Gibson said Dawson-Durgan was angry, devastated, "and he wasn’t going to tolerate it."

A longtime engineer for General Electric, Singh had acquired residential and commercial properties that he would renovate and lease. Dawson-Durgan worked for him, helping manage the properties.

"He told me he didn't have (the money). I knew he was lying," Dawson-Durgan told detectives. "I told him I owed somebody $80,000."

A jury in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court began deliberations Friday afternoon without reaching a verdict and will resume Monday. The case is before Judge Tom Heekin.

Hamilton County Sheriff’s detectives questioned Dawson-Durgan three separate times in the days after the killing. During the last, approximately six-hour interrogation, Bennett said Dawson-Durgan “was ready to say and do anything…to get out of that interview room.”

In closing arguments, Gibson described a hazily conceived plot by Dawson-Durgan that ended with him fatally shooting Singh in the garage of Singh’s Symmes Township house.

Two days before, Dawson-Durgan drove a woman he’d met at the casino to a Norwood Family Dollar store to buy a prepaid cellphone. He then used that cellphone to send anonymous, threatening text messages to Singh. Dawson-Durgan, in fact, told investigators another man ran up and shot Singh as they were talking in the garage. He also told investigators he'd sent the texts to try to convince Singh to leave town.

The day of the early morning killing, Dawson-Durgan called Singh and sent text messages from another location where he said they were supposed to meet, asking Singh where he was.

It was all part of a plan, Gibson said, to mislead law enforcement “in the event something…should happen to Mr. Singh.”